“People didn’t look at it for women as having a career,” Schwartz says. In the last decades, many young religious women were told that voice was a hopeless pursuit at worst, a secret hobby at best. As soon as I would be bat mitzvah and considered a woman, I would not be allowed to perform in front of men anymore.” “But I always knew I had a cutoff when I would turn 12. “Music was my second language,” she says from her home in Philadelphia. Kosman grew up in a rabbinic family in Moscow, where she was surrounded by a vibrant cultural scene. For nearly a century, then, these women have been faced with an agonizing dilemma: What do you do when you are born with a gift-but you are religiously forbidden from using it fully? This practice continued through the 20th century, when in some ways Orthodoxy became even more stringent: Beyond the school years, a talented (and trained) female voice was rarely heard. Orthodox Judaism has always sent mixed messages to girls and young women interested in the performing arts.Īs early as pre–World War II, theater was encouraged in Polish Jewish girls’ schools as a form of fostering self-esteem and creativity in young women, but it had to be done in strictly female spaces. Can we give them something fun, pop, where they don’t have to go and watch and listen to the other music out there?” But I have a different mission-to empower young girls and women. “If you look at pop stars today-it is not about the music,” she says. Much of Schwartz’s motivation is what she sees as a responsibility to a future generation of religious women. Three years later Schwartz now has close to 20,000 followers on Instagram, a series of music videos, a packed calendar with concerts, and a vocal lessons practice, in which young girls in long pleated uniform skirts and button-down blouses practice singing Beyonce’s “Halo.” “But now there is such a boom in the industry, people are used to it…they appreciate it.” “I had gotten a lot of online harassment in the beginning because what I was doing was so daring and so different and so new,” Schwartz says, adding that she learned to immediately block accounts that harass her, creating a “curated” community online. You just have to live your life and ignore people.’ People will take anything from you and turn it into something that it wasn’t. “My husband kept reminding me: ‘You are allowed to create kosher things. I had to figure out how to feel about that,” she says. “People were like, ‘What are you doing? It’s kol isha,’” she says. At first she received pushback from community members. When Schwartz started posting her songs to Instagram-with a disclaimer, “for women and girls only”-it was then everything shifted. But Schnurman believed in her and encouraged her to pursue singing despite the challenges.
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